I'm using a strategy my AP History teacher taught me to do whenever I have to do an important paper; take a brain dump. This is where you just write everything off the top of your head you know about your subject, then you go back to revise and find a flow to work with. It's how I always get my best work, so I figured it'd be appropriate here.
There
has always been a pop music, and the scape of it is ever changing.
Trends come into popularity almost out of thin air, and are as malleable
and impermanent as the people who help shape them. It is through these
trends that we can see what our culture finds most important over time.
In more recent american history, we’ve seen drastic shifts in the
musical landscape as the country has changed through the years.From the
initial acoustic folk music to jazz, from the emergence of the electric
guitar and the plethora of musical genres that stemmed from it’s
invention. The start and fruition of the music industry as we know it
today has always been influenced by the culture that surrounds it: the
family friendly 50’s, the rebellious and psychedelic 60’s, but it’s also
around this time we start to see a new trend in music appear. We see
the surge of new music that will forever be known as pop music, starting
with the birth of Disco.The mainly technological and electronic music
started a trend in music that would last to this very day; that trend
being the allure of using electronic sounds and editing to produce
music. This had actually started to become the norm in all facets of
music, but disco was a whole other beast entirely. it was mainly being
produced with piano and synthesizers are over conventional instruments,
and this is where style over substance really started to take full
swing. You started to require a specific look that an audience was
expecting; which was bell bottoms and teased hair at the time. It also
left a lasting effect on the industry, because, even with the death of
disco, other forms of more manufactured musicians started to emerge. The
70’s lead way to techno, electronic, and bubblegum pop. Instead of
people being taken for their musical talent, they were being scouted for
their marketability. Granted, there were still many other forms of
music that started to gain popularity, but this techno pop still had a
strong and ever growing presence. Such was the case with the 90’s and
it’s overly produced teen idles. Starlets like Britney Spears and
Jessica Simpson, who we’re the best singers on their own, were made huge
starts with the advances in music technology. Music as a whole was
actually being heavily edited electronically, but the pop scene of the
era seemed to take it to a whole new level in the respect that it was
made just for how much money they can make for music companies cheaply,
and this is where we really see marketability over musicianship take
root. The teen idles fizzled out of fashion, and tech still ruled the
airwave, but in more rap and hip-hop scenes, and that’s where it’s
stayed to date. The idea of feel good/ clubbing music still is the most
top charting form of music in America today, and has jumped to a whole
new level of popularity with the addition of a new invetion; and
invention that would change the face of music forever. This invention
was simply called Auto-Tune, and has had a drastic effect on the music
industry as a whole.
